This blog features observations from Randy Turner, a former teacher, newspaper reporter and editor. Send news items or comments to rturner229@hotmail.com

Sunday, March 15, 2015

Mark Rohr to Houston Chronicle: We vetted Wallace-Bajjali thoroughly

At first, it seemed amazing that so many people fell for former Joplin master developer David Wallace's slick sales spiel.

It could be as simple as P. T. Barnum's old saying, "There's a sucker born every minute."

But in a thoroughly researched report in today's Houston Chronicle, former City Manager Mark Rohr, now the city manager of League City, Texas, says the company was completely investigated before he and the Citizens Advisory Recovery Team (CART) recommended its hiring.

Mayor Mike Seibert also thought the hiring of Wallace-Bajjali would be great for Joplin.

Wallace showed up in Joplin with plans for a re-imagined city: It could soon be home to a minor league baseball stadium - a common thread among his renovation proposals - and a new hotel, a medical school and a nursing home, even a vast commercial development with a movie theater. In all there would be 17 different projects, Joplin's Mayor Seibert said.

"We thought we'd made a great decision," Seibert said of the city's choice to hire Wallace Bajjali.

Their partnership had been one of six companies to submit a redevelopment proposal to Joplin's Citizens Advisory Recovery Team, a group responsible for guiding the city through its rebuilding. Four of these groups were interviewed, but the advisory team only presented one to City Council for approval: Wallace Bajjali.

Mark Rohr, then Joplin's city manager, said he knew of Wallace Bajjali's history but didn't think at the time it should knock the firm out of the running. Lawsuits and even bankruptcies are not uncommon in the world of development and construction.

"Everything was vetted on the front end, thoroughly," Rohr said.

Not everyone was fooled by the former Sugar Land, Texas, mayor. Also, from the Houston Chronicle article:

And so, on April 2, 2012, Joplin's City Council voted 8-0 to move forward with contract negotiations with Wallace Bajjali. Just one councilman, Benjamin Rosenberg, abstained.

Rosenberg said he was always suspicious of Wallace Bajjali and had raised concerns in the 2012 meeting about lack of information on the company.

"He reminded me a lot of an aluminum siding salesman who just got off a Greyhound bus and was going to sell all he could and then get back on the bus and leave," Rosenberg said of Wallace.

11 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I love the name "Citizens" Advisory Recovery Team. There are only a handful of self- selected "citizens" on this team. There was no process for a democratically elected representative group of "citizens." So how does a small special interest group weild so much power? Simple. They co-opt legitimate groups of duly elected political types who are easily manipulated by the powerful elite appealing to their vanity and desire to be part of that elite.

Since. CART really only includes the "First Citizens," we should change the name to F-CART.

What Turner readers fail to understand is that Rohr used the most reliable and sophisticated vetting process known to man. He asked Anson to look into the man' s soul. Couple that with the good omen revealed in the entrails of a sacrificial pigeon, and you have irrefutable proof of the unimpeachable character of these wrongly maligned servants of the public good.

CART members include CJ Huff and Nancy Good. I'm sure there's a reason why he wants her on the Board. Let's see to it that they are both shut down. This group, plus the school board, plus JPAC, all need to be dispersed. They also are on the boards of Bright Futures and Bright Futures USA. None of this is because they are altruistic at heart.

About Me

I am a former teacher in the Joplin and Diamond, Missouri, school districts. Before entering the teaching field, I spent 22 years as a reporter and editor for various Southwest Missouri newspapers. I have published three novels, Small Town News, Devil's Messenger, and No Child Left Alive, and seven non-fiction books, The Turner Report, Newspaper Days, Silver Lining in a Funnel Cloud, Greed, Corruption, and the Joplin Tornado, 5:41: Stories from the Joplin Tornado, Spirit of Hope: The Year After the Joplin Tornado, Scars from the Tornado and Let Teachers Teach.

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